DynamicsCon Fall 2021 Preview: The data trends driving interest in Microsoft's Inventory Visibility Add-In for Dynamics 365 SCM

Editor's Note: MSDW is a media sponsor of DynamicsCon.

DynamicsCon 2021 is a free four-day virtual event set to begin on September 20. MSDW spoke with Microsoft MVP and presenter Paul Heisterkamp about his session and what attendees should expect at the upcoming event.

Making sense of new inventory visibility capabilities

Heisterkamp has worked for Microsoft partner GWS since 2009. After starting off focusing on Dynamics NAV, he switched to Dynamics AX in 2011, becoming a solution architect in 2015. He launched a blog in 2018 and won the prestigious Microsoft MVP award last year, as well as the even more selective FastTrack recognized solution architect.

In my case, I'm mostly doing projects in the independent [automotive] aftermarket, selling spare parts for cars and trucks. Our normal project size in this area is around 1,500 users in these companies. A typical implementation project has a duration of one to three years.

During DynamicsCon, Heisterkamp will present a session on new inventory visibility capabilities that were revealed in September 2020 and became generally available in early August for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. Customers increasingly want quick answers when searching for inventory so that they can move on to a different supplier if an item is not in stock, he explained:

It is a highly scalable microservice to request inventory on hand data, using OData requests that puts some pressure on the ERP database. With the new inventory visibility [add-in] you can scale out this workload to the Dataverse or Power Platform environment to better handle the load…You are able to request via the App Service API. The format is JSON input and output, so you can use it almost everywhere. It is very easy to integrate because JSON is commonly used.

Fresh insights

DynamicsCon is a chance for community members to network and gain new insights on the latest developments in the Microsoft Dynamics space. Heisterkamp explained some of this year's big themes: